Page 14 of Touch Her and Die
“I called in a favor for more intel. Although the IP addresses are hidden and the tracks well covered, I know a guy who knows a guy who’s had to deal with this scumbag. There’s a lot of red tape on this guy. A lot of stuff stopping the locals from arresting him.”
I nodded, and we both started to jog.
“I take it we have all the ‘what we don’t see didn’t happen’ permission?”
He nodded at me as we turned down into what was more run-down, industrial leftovers.
“Which building?”
There was no sign of her or the guy. Her little dot blinked, but it didn’t tell me enough.Fucking GPS accuracy was on my last nerve.
The only noises were those of the cars down the main street backfiring and chugging along. A siren or five and the squeak of metal and then I heard it. A little laugh.
We didn’t need to talk from this point on. This wasn’t the first time we’d taken out a few odd characters with an unofficial blessing from the local cops. They scratched our backs, sometimes we took care of what they couldn’t. Win-win if you asked me. Kept me out of jail and my uncle never questioned how I got some of the less savory jobs done.
The rotting buildings were a concrete graveyard, but we both heard the slam and click of a door to our left. Bingo. We found my little rainbow.
I grabbed at the door and yanked. It didn’t budge. Think this through. There was always a way in.
I started to run around the buildings, in and out of the crevices between them. This wasn’t an old factory. These were just old storage buildings. Maybe they’d held some drug businesses, who the fuck cared. They were still big enough that they were a few stories tall, and I had no way in. I ran to a rolling door, certainly it was locked, but I’d try anyway.
The racing of my heart, the sweat beading my forehead, and the wetness of my shirt told me I wasn’t remaining calm.
“Boss. Parks, stop.”
I didn’t register what was happening until he fucking punched me in the side.
“Fuck,” I said and gasped in a breath.
“Skylight. Stop. You won’t get anywhere, and you can’t help her if you announce our arrival. Skylight.”
The words sank in. Skylight.
“Where is it?”
My guy gave a curt nod up and walked away. Around the backside of this rusty hellhole.
“We need to climb up that.”
The ladder was a little less ladder and a lot more rusted out corrosive bars.
“Maybe your fat ass stays here,” I said, trying to keep my cool.
He didn’t crack a smile. I’m sure he knew that regardless how I tried to be calm, Halle had found a way to trigger the fear I’d thought I’d grown out of. I had to jump to grab the bottom rung that still looked like it was attached at both ends.
I pulled myself up and grabbed for a different rung. Alternating my hands and feet, I skipped the ones that were already obviously broken or rotted through.
“Fuck,” I said under my breath as one of them broke off in my hand and I nearly fell.
I didn’t care. My adrenaline wouldn’t allow me to stop.
Halle fucking pissed me off. Here I was, unprepared, diving in headfirst into a fucking disaster.
Why was she doing this? I told her I loved her, and I would fix it. But she couldn’t let me. She couldn’t let anyone fix anything. The only things she knew how to do were overreact and medicate. Too bad her version of medicating couldn’t be drinking heavily.
I made it to the top, but a few fucking feet shy. Great. I reached above me and was able to get a palm on the edge. I balanced myself on the last rung and pulled myself up in time to hear something. Voices?
Following what I was certain was Halle, I made my way over to what passed as a skylight.
